


I'll Be Your Person

by Kacka



Series: When We're Older [2]
Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-28
Updated: 2016-02-28
Packaged: 2018-05-23 18:01:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6125284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kacka/pseuds/Kacka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bellamy doesn't mean to overreact so badly, but he's kind of a basket case when it comes to his feelings for Clarke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'll Be Your Person

Bellamy has known Clarke for years, so he’s well acquainted by now with her peevishness and generally low threshold for the frustrations of the world. That’s why when she bursts into his room and collapses across his bed, he’s not all that perturbed, at first.

“Ugh.” Her groan is muffled in his comforter. 

“I hope my knees broke your fall and not your ribs, there,” he says mildly. Even though he doesn’t look up from his lesson plan, he can still see her hold up her middle finger in his peripheral vision. “You want to talk about it?”

“What are you, my therapist?”

He doesn’t answer, because he’s also well acquainted with her stubborn side and he’s sure that if he’s silent she’ll start talking.

“Lexa is engaged,” Clarke mumbles after a moment. He pauses and sets his plans aside. This is potentially an actual crisis.

Clarke and Lexa had been hot and heavy for a few months, but Clarke had isolated herself from almost all her friends in the process. When they’d broken up it had been catastrophic for her, but he hadn’t been a big enough person to help her through it, and it had taken a while for his relationship with Clarke to normalize again. By normalize, he means shift from stilted conversation and tense disagreements back to amicable arguments disguising underlying affection. Not disguising it well, but most days he thinks he does okay.

Come to think of it, the underlying affection he has for Clarke is probably what made her withdrawal sting so much.

“You okay?”

“Yeah?” It comes out as more of a question than an answer. He nudges her with his shins and she rolls onto her back. He likes to see Clarke’s face always, but especially when he’s worried about her emotional state.

“Hence the dramatics.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” He picks his papers back up and pretends to study them, waiting her out again.

“What if I never find my person?” She says after a predictably brief silence.

“What?”

“You heard me,” she scowls, defensive. If she thinks he’s gonna make her feel crappier than she already does, he must be better at masking the underlying affection than he thought.

“No, I did,” he says gently. “But I didn’t realize this was something that would be bugging you.”

“I’m very deep and complex.”

“If one of us should be worried about becoming a lonely old cat lady it’s definitely me,” he points out. “I’m four years older and you have dander allergies.”

“Great, so I can’t even fall back on pets.”

“You can, they just have to be hypoallergenic. Like those naked cats. Besides," he says, hoping this next part comes out friendly and doesn't give away too much, "your person is definitely out there. It’s unthinkable that no one would ever recognize how awesome you are.” 

“Please don’t make me picture myself holding a hairless cat ever, ever again,” she grumbles, rubbing at her eyes like she can physically remove the image. “I hate feeling insecure like this. I'm usually good with my singleness. It would be nice to have somebody, but I'm fine being unattached right now. I just wish there was some way I could peek into the future and know that one day I'll find my person, you know?"

Bellamy does know. He feels that way himself, a lot of the time. The rest of the time, he's overly conscious that he has a thing for his best friend. She exhales, long and slow and says, "Maybe I’d feel better if I had a backup plan.”

That does sound like Clarke. Plans make her feel more secure, even if she doesn’t follow them in the end. 

“You gonna get yourself a mail-order bride?” He teases.

“No way, that's so shady. I was thinking more like one of those deals where if two friends are single at forty, they agree to go ahead and get married.” She squints at him. “You’d do it, right?”

Bellamy has never been stabbed before, but this is what he imagines it would feel like. There's a pain in his gut, he's not sure he's breathing right, and panic flooding his mind. It hurts more than he feared it would, and somehow he can't stop himself from lashing out in retribution.

“Why, because I’m the only person you know whose love life is more pathetic than yours?” He seethes, yanking his feet out from under her and storming out of his bedroom.

“No,” she sputters, trailing behind him with equal fire. “If anything, I’m the pathetic one here. I just thought– it would be a mutually–”

“Please don’t finish that sentence.” He yanks a beer out of his fridge and opens it with maybe more force than absolutely necessary. It’s mostly for something to do, but part of him feels like this conversation would be easier if he were drunk. “You want us to _use_ each other in ten to fifteen years because you’re lonely now. I know Lexa makes you act like a different person, but I didn’t think you were that selfish, Clarke.”

“I know Lexa makes _you_ act like an asshole, but I didn’t think you were going to kick me when I’m down just for making a _joke_.” Her words pack a punch, her voice crescendoing as she goes.

“Oh I’m the asshole here?” He’s aware that he’s yelling, but he’s lost the ability to modulate his voice. “I don’t even know what to do with this Clarke. If the prospect of being forever alone is so awful, you do something about it. You get on Tinder or OkCupid or Farmers Only, you grow a pair and ask out the barista you’ve been flirting with for the past few months, you get a friend to set you up with someone. You don’t drag your friends down with you.”

“Is the prospect of being married to me one day really that terrible? Because if that’s what you’re saying, this is the opposite of what I came here for.”

Her face is raw with anger and something else, something he doesn’t want to name.

vHe wants to tell her that no, the prospect of being her husband is as far from terrible as he thinks he can get, except that in her scenario he’s the equivalent of his sister’s teddy bear she used to squeeze when she was a kid and angrily hiding out in her room.

”Yeah, well, making you feel better at the expense of everyone else’s feelings is what got us here in the first place,” he says coolly, equal parts self-righteous and horrified with himself as she starts to tear up. “I can’t do this with you,” he sighs, setting his beer on the counter with a clunk and yanking on his coat and shoes.

The door slams hard behind him on the way out of his own apartment, and he knows he’s acting about half his age, but he can’t make himself stop.

She’s not there when he gets back, and he doesn’t know whether to be relieved or regretful.

It’s almost a week before he sees or hears from her again, and even then it’s not because she actually wants to see him.

They’re at the Drop Ship for their weekly night out. He beats her there, slides heavily onto a bar stool and starts liquoring himself up in hopes that he’ll be able to come up with an apology or explanation that doesn’t involve how far gone he is for her. When she arrives, however, she deliberately chooses a seat on the other side of the room. He tries not to watch her in the mirror behind the bar and mostly fails. It distracts him enough that he loses count of how many refills Murphy gives him.

“What’s up with you and Clarke?” Miller asks, blunt, setting a beer in front of Bellamy and pushing his whiskey out of reach.

“I’m an asshole. What else is new?” 

“The whole not-speaking thing is new. It’s kind of freaking everybody out, too.”

Bellamy sighs.

“Are you going to give me advice or are you just going to make me feel worse?”

Miller pulls out his unimpressed stone face. Nobody does unimpressed like Miller does unimpressed.

“You and I both know that however justified you are in being mad, you’re overreacting because you’ve got a thing for her,” Miller says seriously. “It’s unfair to take that out on her or anyone else.”

“You done?”

“In summary, pull your head out of your ass,” Miller tells him, rolling his eyes. But he doesn’t leave Bellamy to wallow alone, and that’s kind of nice.

They sit there in relative silence, watching Murphy fail to flirt with some women down at the other end of the bar, until Monty sidles up to his boyfriend.

“How’d yours go?” He asks. Miller gives Bellamy a sidelong look and shrugs.

“I told him to pull his head out of his ass. There’s no guarantee he’ll listen to me.”

Monty leans forward to look Bellamy in the eyes, hands him a fruity cocktail, and says, “Pull your head out of your ass.”

There’s something in his face that tells Bellamy he means business, so he finishes his beer, grabs the drink, and crosses the room to where Clarke is sitting. She’s looking down at the table, tracing her finger back and forth and looking generally miserable.

Any anger still aimed toward her redirects itself inward and he’s suddenly very aware that he’s going to get his heart broken tonight.

And it does hurt, to lay himself out there. It hurts, how appalled she looks, how he can see her searching for the words to let him down easy. He can’t hear it, doesn’t want to make her say it, so he stumbles over some variant on “let’s stay friends,” really meaning it, and gets the hell out of there.

It’s snowing outside, but the alcohol has made him warm and melancholy. He decides to walk home, hoping the cold will make him numb or that he’ll feel like enough of an idiot by the time he gets home that he’ll have something else to think about.

He sets himself a deadline for thinking about Clarke in the wistful way he’s doing now. If he’s serious about wanting to stay friends with her, he can’t just pine for her. There’s got to be some measure of moving forward. He can’t just stand still. So he spends his walk in the cold thinking about her, about what he can’t have, and assures himself that when he gets back to his apartment he’s going to start actively trying to get over her. 

But then he arrives, still lost in his thoughts, and she’s there, yelling epithets and berating him for being out in the cold, and it feels a little bit like hope. Like maybe their friendship will survive, if nothing else.

“What are you doing here?” He hears himself ask.

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m in love with you?” She says, faltering on the words like they’re rusty from disuse. They shock her just as much as they do him, and he feels a smile tug at his lips before the full meaning of the words really hits him.

“Did it ever occur to you?” He asks, replaying her outburst in his mind as she steps closer. The whole thing feels like a dream he never dared to follow all the way through to the end, even more so when the she’s suddenly in his arms and he’s kissing her for all he’s worth.

He doesn’t say it back until a few hours later, when they’re lying tangled together in his bed, not really carrying a conversation, just enjoying each other’s company. Tired as he is, he doesn’t want to go to sleep yet. Not when being awake is so much better.

“You want to 'end up with me'," she says, her voice light.

“Are you telling me, or asking?”

“I'm quoting you. You said it earlier. At the bar.”

“Did I?” He asks, trying to think back. “That was the scariest thing I’ve ever done. It’s all kind of a blur, honestly.” 

“Well, you did sort of imply big things,” she says, nuzzling into his neck. “But I won’t hold you to it.”

“I figure we should at least see how dating goes for a while,” he says, sliding his hand from her side down to her hip. “But if we haven’t killed each other yet, I think we’re probably in the clear.”

“Yeah, because the mark of a good relationship is not ending in homicide,” Clarke teases him, jumping when he pinches her. But she jumps toward him, so he’s not really complaining.

“You’re my person,” he says baldly, honestly. “I’m in love with you, too. I’m serious about you. Is that what you wanted to know?”

“I mostly just wanted to make fun of you,” she says, but her voice is soft. Awed.

“Tease me about my angsty declaration of love? That does sound more like you,” he says, grinning into the darkness. "Anytime you need to hear it, all you have to do is ask."

He can feel her smile into his skin.

"I will keep that in mind."

* * *

"I can tell a lot of embarrassing stories about Bellamy," Miller says, clearly enjoying watching his friend squirm in discomfort before a room full of pretty much everyone he cares about. "But Clarke has pretty much seen him at his worst, and she's still around, so all I'll say is that he's a pretty lucky guy."

Bellamy relaxes and clasps his wife's hand, a thrill running through him as she traces the outline of the ring he's just put on. 

"You guys just stood up and made a bunch of vows to each other," Miller continues, smirking at the groom. "So I think it's only fitting that I make one to the two of you now. I promise that I will be there, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do you part, to tell Bellamy when he needs to pull his head out of his ass, and to keep telling him until he listens." 

Bellamy is pretty sure Abby Griffin is somewhere frowning, but he can feel Clarke's body shaking against him with her soft laughter and he can't bring himself to care all that much.

"That's my vow to you guys. Everybody, please raise a glass to the happy couple."

Everyone echoes his toast and drinks.

"We're going to hold you to that vow," Clarke tells Miller as he takes his seat.

"Well, there's not a lot of hope that you'll never need to," Miller says seriously, dodging Bellamy's hand as he tries to cuff him upside the head.

"I already know that," Clarke says, pressing a kiss behind Bellamy's ear. It's surprisingly intimate for how many people are probably watching them. "I married him anyway."

"I don't get it," Miller says, shaking his head and turning to talk to Monty. Bellamy kisses her quick and soft.

"I don't get it either," he whispers. "But you don't have a backup anymore." It's a running joke that they've come back to often since they got engaged. "This one has to stick."

"Don't worry," she says, giving his wedding ring a purposeful twist. "It will."


End file.
